Frosty
by Neale
Summary: This is Mary's story, my version of it anyway.


**This is Mary's story, my version of it anyway.**

**Usual disclaimer for the land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

UCLA Campus 1972

Mary Elizabeth Knutsson was worried about why she had been called into her advisor's office, she knew that she was in the top five percentile in all her courses, was doing well on the track team and cheerleader squad, as far as she knew she was at the top of her game, so why was she summarily summoned to see him? The time she was kept waiting as she sat outside his office for her appointment just added to her worries. What she WAS told when she was sent into his office, though, was nothing that she could have expected. When she went in there was another man waiting with him, and between them they explained that the government had been keeping an eye on her, and told her that it was because she was at the top of her game that she was there, then they asked her if she was ready to serve her country. Over the space of the next hour and a half or so they praised her achievements in the various areas, told her what a difference she could make, and she was convinced that it was nothing less than her duty to join the CIA and work to protect her country, so that was what she agreed to.

From that time Mary attended specific CIA training on weekends and breaks from university, as well as taking on additional studies and activities in what little free time she had between her coursework and her existing extra activities (none of which she was allowed to drop). (Of course, the CIA had been doing this long enough to leave the inducement training until almost the end, to cement her commitment to the program before she was shown how she had been coerced into agreeing.) Throughout the rest of her time at university she was always on the go and worn out, her workload went up by at least 50% (more like 100% sometimes) because of her CIA mandated activities, and she took on language studies, martial arts, acting classes, electronics classes, as well as a wide range of other things that she didn't understand and weren't explained, she was just ordered to comply.

The way she kept coming back from weekends away covered with bruises had her girlfriends convinced that she had an abusive boyfriend that she wasn't telling them about, or something worse (they'd watched those S&amp;M and B&amp;D movies with their boyfriends when they were trying to get them turned on, though of course their boyfriends didn't understand that that was just ensuring that they weren't getting anything if THAT was what they wanted). Nothing Mary could say to them could change their minds and they were getting ready to go to talk to her family about it, so Mary went to her handlers to explain the situation and ask for advice. Mary's handlers removed the more physical aspects of the weekend sessions (or rather transferred them to the longer trainings during the breaks from uni), and told her to tell her girlfriends that yes, she had had a boyfriend who was knocking her about, but she'd finally broken up with him and he was out of her life now. Her friends didn't really believe her when she told them that, but when she stopped coming back from weekends with bruises, they finally accepted that she had told them the truth (Mary hated lieing to the people she cared about and wondered if it ever get any easier, because she didn't see how it could).

Mary graduated (with honours) at the end of 1973, and went straight into six months of intensive training at the CIA facilities. It was far harder than anything she'd gone through before, all the extra activities that she'd been forced to do by the CIA while she was still at uni seemed to be nothing more than an introduction compared to what she was doing now. She felt like she could hardly move when she dropped into bed at the end of each night, and it probably due to her own exhaustion that she didn't see what her instructors and supervisors did, that as bad as she thought she was, she left every other recruit WAY behind. Some of the others may not have been as exhausted as she was at the end of the day, but they hadn't accomplished a fraction of what she had, either. Mary Knutsson was attracting a lot of attention.

Once her six months training was finished, Mary was sent out on missions with more experienced agents, it took a fair bit of work to get her past her aversion to killing, but the indoctrination that she'd been subjected to ever since that first recruitment meeting had paved the way, so they managed to convince her that she was doing the right thing and she finally adapted to the role that they wanted her for. Over the next couple of years Mary Knutsson gathered far more fame than any other female agent in the history of the agency for her achievements, and she came to the attention of some very powerful and ambitious men, so it was no surprise to those in the inner circles when she was selected late in 1976 to be on the team assigned to that technological genius from MIT who was doing post grad work with Stanford for a classified CIA funded project, Stephen Bartowski.

When Mary was assigned to be Stephen Bartowki's lab assistant and serve as his primary protection, she sensed that something was going on behind the scenes, but couldn't work out quite what it was. There WAS something strange about the way that young Deputy Director, Langston Graham, was running the operation, but she couldn't argue that Stephen was being protected around the clock (which was the mandate for the operation), so maybe he was just zealous? Perhaps he was trying to make a good impression on those he reported to, just as she was.

It certainly wasn't a chore for Mary to be around Stephen, he showed an almost childlike delight when he was gushing about his discoveries (or rather THEIR discoveries, as he was adamant that they were the achievement of everyone in the lab, not just himself) and he was funny and, well, nice. Mary wished that she could get some down time, though, she was with Stephen at least 50-60 hours a week in the lab, but she also still seemed to pull one or two night-time protective details a week quite often, there were four people on the team, but she seemed to be the one at Stephen's side seven days a week, they spent more time together than most married couples!

She decided that she had to talk to someone about the hours after the incident, though. She had been getting stretched to the point that she was too exhausted to do her job properly, and when she was on protective duty for the second night in a row after 14 hours in the lab she fell asleep, only to wake up hours later to find that Stephen had taken off her shoes, made her comfortable on the couch and put a blanket over her, if he could manage to do all that without waking her, how was she supposed to protect him against intruders? When she went to Deputy Director Graham about the situation, he said that he understood the issue and would advise her (and the rest of the team) when he had decided on the best course of action. When Graham came back with his orders, though, she couldn't believe it. All that she could think of was that he was punishing her for telling him that his existing setup wasn't working, because her new orders were that she was to move in with Stephen as his live in girlfriend (as well as being his lab assistant), while the other three members of the team were splitting the outside protective shifts, she would be by Stephen's side 24/7. She tried to argue these orders with him but she found out how he'd risen as quickly as he had, the man was an unrelenting force of nature, the only options she was going to get from him were to do the assignment as directed, or spend the rest of her career (and probably life) in some remote Arctic listening post. Mary gave in, but pushed her luck as far as requesting that Deputy Director Graham advise Stephen of what would be happening, as she had no idea how she'd get Stephen to agree to the fact that they'd be joined at the hip for the foreseeable future. She was surprised when Graham agreed to her request, and said he would fill her in once he had done so.

When she got a call from Graham to advise her that he had explained the situation to Stephen Bartowski and he was fine with it, she found it hard to believe, but she just thanked him and made a note to herself to find a way to ask Stephen about it when no-one else could overhear them. It did occur to her that they looked exactly like what their cover said they were when she grabbed his hand and dragged him off to a disused office at the back of the building, but she didn't really care about that, she DID care about Stephen and wanted to make sure that he was really OK with what they were being forced into, and that he understood that she had had nothing to do with it. Their private conversation became awkward after he confirmed that he'd agreed to the requirements because of the veiled threats that Graham had made about getting rid of her and replacing her with another female agent in that role. Mary was probably even more shocked than he was when she threw her arms around him and hugged him when he told her that he'd agreed to Graham's demands because if he was going to be with anyone all the time, he wanted it to be her. Of course, when she realised that she had done, she dropped her arms and stepped back, mumbling "Thank you Mr Bartowski" before advising him that they should get back to their lab. Stephen just had a stunned (but happy) look on his face as he stumbled back to the lab in front of her.

It turned out that Graham's requirements were more explicit than either of them had known, the place that the agency arranged for them was a one bedroom apartment and they were advised that their sleeping arrangements had to be consistent with their cover (IE, sleeping together), when they both objected to that Graham just fell back on the "If Agent Knutsson isn't acceptable for this arrangement I will replace her with another female agent, and we will do that until we find one who is acceptable to you." argument, so Stephen withdrew his objection. Graham looked at Mary and she just said "Of course sir, whatever is required". If Stephen and Mary hadn't been so nervous and looking away, they may have caught the fleeting look of triumph that passed over Graham's face once they'd acquiesced.

Things were awkward for a while when they moved in together, they would be relaxing in front of the TV and suddenly find that they were almost (if not actually) snuggling, so one or the other would suddenly jump up to go and do something. The sleeping arrangements were also uncomfortable at first, but after they settled in they'd frequently wake up to find themselves in each others' arms. Before too long the inevitable happened and in late 1977, Mary found that she was pregnant. They went into panic mode at that point, but not about the pregnancy (while they didn't discuss it, they were both elated about that), they were panicking about what the CIA would do when they found out. Mary was sure that they'd force her to have an abortion and send her off to the Arctic listening post that he'd threatened her with before, and she wasn't about to let that happen, she'd shoot anyone who tried to force them down that path. So Mary and Stephen snuck off to discuss their options and what they were going to do about it whenever they had a chance. By the time that Mary started to show, they had a plan and were determined to stick with it. They were certain that Graham would immediately send Mary off to have the baby dealt with, and then send her away, so they arranged to have a meeting with him in front of witnesses where Stephen planned to advise the CIA that he would stop all work on their projects until Mary was released from duty and they were free to have and raise their baby together. Mary had the resignation letter written up and signed, all ready to hand it over when Stephen gave them his ultimatum.

Given that they were so psyched up to fight for their relationship and their baby, they were both struck dumb when Graham just said that he presumed that Mary had been going to her doctor to ensure that she and the baby were fine, and asked if they were planning to get married before the baby was born? As he'd just blind-sided them (and neither of them had thought about either of those two points as yet) they just looked at each other and back at him before saying "Yes?", given the way that they were freaking out, neither of them noted the smug look on Graham's face (or that he was already prepared) when he handed Mary the contact details of an obstetrician who was cleared by the CIA and told her that she needed to set up an appointment with him to get checked out properly, and then handed her another note with the details of someone who could organise their wedding quickly and quietly. Mary and Stephen both stammered as they thanked him and quickly left the room.

Using the contacts that Graham gave Mary, she got the all clear (along with loads of tests) from the obstetrician she was sent to, and they had a nice but small wedding a couple of weeks later, the wedding dress that the wedding planner had organised hid the pregnancy, so they had some nice wedding pictures to hang on the wall (while the marriage license was backdated by six months so that they were officially married nearly twelve months when Eleanor Faye Bartowski was born a little over five months later). Mary did note how quickly the CIA organised for a nice three bedroom house to replace the one bedroom apartment before Eleanor was born.

When Eleanor was born, Mary went back to working with Stephen in the lab, as they did work well together. Because it was a classified CIA project and their lab was a restricted access facility, there really weren't any visitors to question the fact that they had a baby in a crib in the corner of the lab as they worked. They were fairly happy in those times, yes, Stephen was busy (they both were), but they had time for each other and the baby, keeping her in the lab while they worked may not have been "perfect parenting" by many's standards, but it did mean that she was there, with them, and they could both see her whenever they wanted. As she got older, the crib went and that corner of the lab became her play corner, while a stubborn child (Mary thought that she probably got that from both of them, poor little love), Eleanor understood boundaries and she didn't stray out of her corner, so they didn't need to watch her all the time.

Through the end of the seventies and most of the eighties Stephen developed and delivered whatever technology the CIA demanded of him, there was another slowdown of the work when Eleanor was four, because her little brother Charles was born. Mary's role in Stephen's work decreased when Charles was born, as she now had two children to watch over, and the nature of Stephen's core project was by then so far off the charts that mere mortals couldn't understand what he was doing, let alone help him with it. She still worked with him in the lab, though, with Eleanor and Charles over in Eleanor's play corner so she and Stephen could be with them at any time.

While Stephen developed all sorts of technology for the CIA over the decade and a half or so that his project ran, from the late '70s (soon after Eleanor was born), a large degree of his time was focussed on one particular technology. When Mary asked him what it was meant to do, the best description that Stephen could come up with was that it was a mind programming process intended to give instant training to agents. This was of course WAY over Mary's head (especially when Stephen showed her part of the schematics and code), but she trusted that if anyone could make it work, her husband could. One requirement of that part of the project that Mary did know about was the one that Deputy Director Graham gave him early in the piece, to create a mechanism that could imprint a new persona on an agent (and remove it once the mission was concluded, but Graham really only seemed interested in the whether the imprinting would work, and not too concerned about whether the agent could be recovered once the mission was over).

Before Charles was born, Graham was pushing for a demonstration of how far they'd gotten with the persona imprinting capability, and one of Stephen's colleagues (Hartley Winterbottom from England) volunteered to be a guinea pig. Hartley had worked with Stephen on the encoding for this function and had every confidence in Stephen and the work that they'd done, so he was comfortable being the subject for the "Agent X" persona. Mary thought that it was amazing how shy, sweet Hartley suddenly turned into this brash Russian character for the period that had been coded into the program, at which point he zoned out and came back as Hartley again. Even Graham seemed impressed, though he didn't say so, he just gave Stephen a pile of extra requirements, though he did add the caveat that this functionality could go on the back-burner for now, as the primary purpose of the technology (imprinting significant amounts of information) was the main priority.

Over the next seven or eight years, Stephen and his colleagues worked on the imprinting technology and anything else that was requested of them, and Mary assisted where possible. Their children grew up in that environment, until first Eleanor and then Charles started school (and Mary missed them so much when she couldn't see them at any time, she'd gotten so used to having the whole family together). When Charles was about 8 ½, Graham came to Stephen with an urgent requirement for the Agent X persona to be able to work in the field for at least a month or two, as they needed to use it to infiltrate the arms dealer network in Eastern Europe. Stephen and Hartley reworked the image with the new parameters and time limits (setting a hard reset time limit of six months, but adding code to allow it to be reset with the right triggers and to hard-code an mild affection for Mary into it, to ensure that she could get close enough to use those triggers), then Graham coerced Hartley into being the Agent X host again, as he'd already shown a compatibility for it.

Hartley accepted the role and loaded the Agent X "Alexei Volkoff" persona before being shipped off to Russia. At that point, everything went wrong, the persona must have been corrupted somehow as THIS Alexei Volkoff was far more violent than the original persona, yes, he fitted in and ruled in the environment that he was in, but Hartley would have a hard time handling what he'd been and what he'd done when he came back. Mary wanted to go in to reset Hartley and get him out, but Deputy Director Graham wouldn't allow it, saying that they were getting good mileage from this (which was the prime objective of the mission), and it would automatically reset at six months, so she could go in to extract him then. When the time came, Mary made the arrangements and reluctantly left Stephen and the children for what was meant to be a two week mission to recover Hartley when Agent X reset itself.

Once she got to Russia everything fell apart, she infiltrated Volkoff Industries to be close to Alexei/Hartley when the persona reset, but something was wrong, Alexei didn't have a mild affection for her, he was obsessed with her. Mary waited for the hard reset, but that time came and went without anything happening, so she tried using the manual triggers to initiate the reset, but they didn't work either. Mary was rather worried at this point, she was stuck in Russia with someone who was still a violent psychopath (and the head of a large and rapidly growing illicit weapons company), and couldn't get him out of that persona. Just as she thought that her situation couldn't get any worse though, of course it did, because "Alexei" got a tip off that she was CIA, so she had to do some fast talking to keep herself alive and keep him from finding out about her family (to keep them safe). The obsession that the Alexei Volkoff persona had for her was the only thing that kept her alive, so she became his right hand and did most of his dirty work from then on, keeping the secret of her family in her heart and hoping that Stephen could come up with a way of fixing Alexei/Hartley, and rescue her. Six months passed, then a year, then two, then five, then ten, and Mary had given up wondering whether she'd be saved, she didn't even know whether Stephen was looking for her or what had happened with her children.

In the meantime, to stay alive Mary had to retain and carry on with her role as Frost, Alexei's right hand and enforcer. What she didn't know, of course, was that Langston Graham had advised Stephen that Mary had disappeared after she was found out by Alexei and nothing had been heard of her since then. Graham had also ordered any and all records of her and Alexei Volkoff scrubbed from all systems to prevent anyone tracking her down, and arranged for the salting of the system with documentation showing that she had gone rogue. Mary thought that she'd been forgotten and abandoned (she hadn't, not by Stephen at least, but she was out in the cold with no-one coming after her). All she could do to keep going was think of her children and hope that they were living the lives that she wanted for them.

**A/N: This may make more sense if you read Puppet Master 4 (Chapter 8 of Bad Pennies) FWIW.**


End file.
